The VM was restarted couple of days ago and after that I cannot get into Windows. I get System Recovery Options box. I noticed that all drive letters are mixed up (lease see file attached). I have tried to assign the correct drive letters using diskpart utility, but after a restart it goes back again.

I have tried clonning the VM but. After I run the diskpart utility is OK. However, after a restart of the VM they are again all over the place. I have tried clonning it but since the drive letters are messed up it just replicates the issue.

A co-worker suggested that it might be Storage DRS. He thinks that by moving files (vmdk) around somehow SDRS scewes up the partition table. I said it is complete rubbish, SDRS has nothing to do with it. Anyway. I shall wait to see if someone else has come across this issue.

The VM is a part of a clustered application, which is in a testing mode. The first VM is fine and has all applications loaded wheres this one keeps failing. Both VMs are created from the same template. Both VMs have two drives (C:\ - 50 GB, and Z:\ Pagefile). See file attached.

As far as the DVD is concerned I have attached it just for testing.

I have restarted the VM various times with or without the DVD attached.

Also, after I removed/assigned drive letters with diskpart utility I shutdown the machine and cloned it. No joy unfortunately.

I want to get to the bottom of this for this VM is a test VM, and soon is going into production, and I will be in trouble if this carries on.

The VM is not a domain controller and it has not been converted. It was created from a template and as I said in my previous post the other VM is fine, whereas this VM keeps going into System Recovery Options.

I am facing same issue. Not able to find any solution and this is the only blog where I found exact problem. Can any one please suggest me the solution. Its very urgent as one critical system is doing the same thing.

I had this problem a while back when deploying from a template. So I scrapped all my templates and created .ovf or ova's instead and I haven't had corrupted installs. I unfortunately don't have an explanation but that Is something you might want to consider.

I deployed a new Windows 2008 r2 server from CD (old fashion way) two weeks ago and just now it restarted right in front of my eyes and came up with the system recovery option. I didn't work from a template or anything like that. This, by the way, is the second server that had that problem today. Both created from scratch.

Luckily I have made backups of the servers so restoring them is no big deal (one is a printer server) but I hope this is not going to happen often.

I had the same problem. My solution, which I read above, was to remove the VM from the enclave, go to the vmx file (on my NAS) and re-add the VM to the inventory. I have successfully rebooted several times since.